> > are weaknesses from an investor standpoint
They solely qualify as weaknesses in this modern world where the stock and bond market eat the world.
In the past investing simply meant making money without having to do any work, so even an extremely small profit made without working meant good news for the investor, because the risk free rate was just sitting on top of it and make zero profit, or even negative profit because you had to defend your money against thieves and rats, humidity and sunshine.
Of course nowadays every investment opportuinity is compared against the US Treasury or the SP500 in terms of volatility, liquidity, stability etc...
That's also the reason why we should break up big banks, big banks are always in capital conservation mode and so they will always compare a lending opportuinity against the SP500 and Fed Rate, always inveitably picking the latter even when it's zero. Because for them capital conservation and status quo=winning given that they are so big and powerful already. A small bank is hungry to grow and can only do that by giving out risky loans.
Alternatively the entrepreneur should give some kickbacks to the guy within the big bank who takes the responsibility to extend him loan instead of dumping those funds into Fed Rate and SP500.
An other alternative would be that people stop trusting public companies because cooking the books is trivial and the big 4 auditing companies are clueless anyway, so that at least some of those funds end up being availible for loans at the local level where gossip dominates the conversation and that's a much better instrument to evaluate a company than rating agencies and auditing companies.